Williams Mix (1952) is a work for eight tracks of recorded
magnetic tape directed to eight loudspeakers surrounding the audience. It
is the first known eight-channel electroacoustic surround-sound composition.
Cage created a score for the work that consisted of a graphic layout for tape
recordings made at 15 inches per second, indicating a typology of sounds and
positions for cutting and splicing the recordings together to produce the
required eight channels.
The method of composition used in Williams Mix was drawn both from Cage’s
earlier work with the organization of proportional rhythmic, this composition
using the series 5+6+16+3+11+5, and from his then newer method of making decisions
through chance operations, via the I-Ching and the Tarot. The choices of recordings
to use for Williams Mix were made from six categories: A (city sounds), B
(country sounds), C (electronic sounds), D (manually-produced sounds), E (wind-produced
sounds, including songs), and F (small sounds, requiring amplification to
be heard with the others). Further categories for selection of sounds were
based on pitch, timbre, and loudness. In the original design, around 600 recordings
were necessary to construct the piece, the work requiring several collaborators,
including Earle Brown, Louis and Bebe Barron, David Tudor, and Ben Johnston,
in the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape (1951-1953) funded by the architect
Paul Williams. This version received its premiere at the University of Illinois
Festival of Contemporary Arts on March 22, 1953.
Cage’s score for Williams Mix was not intended to be a schematic for
a single predetermined realization, rather it was intended as a compositional
plan that could be realized, in a sense performed, by others as well, as long
as the categories of sound and the durations of recordings were respected.
The realization heard this afternoon was produced by Larry Austin during the
period 1997-2001 as the first part of a large-scale trope on Williams Mix
entitled Williams [re]Mix[ed].
— Christopher Hopkins

The following statement is offered for In the Arms of Peril:

“As we proceed with our lives, hopes and dreams, and the daily ventures
of life, we are at times exposed to increasingly dangerous provocations,
threats and serious challenges. For some, the real issue is survival. In
this composition, through the use of sonic environments and events, such
confrontations are relived with the persistent search for threads of relief,
from the shadow of being in the arms of peril.” In the Arms of Peril
was completed just prior to September 11, 2001. It was composed, designed
and realized within the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios
specifically for eight-channel performance presentation.
— Scott Wyatt

All At Risk attempts to share some of the feelings I had
when recently reading email messages from a news correspondent friend who
had been sent to Iraq to cover ongoing events there. The emails were sent
to his family who, in-turn, shared it with me. I have left out the much more
graphic moments as I feel the excess gore, pain and suffering would detract
from the basic message of this piece. The stress and overall sense of helplessness
I felt when reading his emails, along with a better sense of the amount of
danger that those in Iraq face on a minute-by-minute basis, is what motivated
the creation of this work.
I have intentionally made the accompanying visual presentation minimal, so
as to mimic the sense of reading the original email. The audio portion of
the piece was created within the University of Illinois Experimental Music
Studios. Special thanks to ABC News correspondent Brian Rooney.
— Scott Wyatt

Orthogonality was written for Matthew Sintchak in the fall
of 1999. The saxophone's motivic material was created by the orthogonal pitch
transformations of inversion and retrograde. The tape was generated from digitally-processed
saxophone pitches and key clicks which were morphed into a percussion ensemble
that accompanies the live saxophone.
— Lawrence Fritts

Within Time Mark (commissioned by percussionist Kathleen
Kastner) are specific considerations including a continuum of timbre —
thus providing for an integration of electroacoustic and live sounds without
the loss of individuality, and spatial disposition - wherein the location
from which sounds emanate within the host performance space is also a parameter
for composition. Originally realized in 1983 with concrete and modular voltage-controlled
synthesis techniques (including much analog tape editing), the electroacoustic
portion of the composition was reworked to reduce the inherent analog tape
hiss and was then digitally re-recorded in 2000.
— Scott Wyatt

l'Horlage imaginaire is an eight-channel tape fantasy based
upon clock sounds. The source recordings for this work emanate from a wide
variety of clocks including the medieval astrological clock in La cathedral
St-Etienne in Bourges, musical clocks of the 19th century, church bells, and
clocks of the present day. Exhibiting both ethereal and percussive sonic landscapes,
this work presents my interpretation of the sounds we associate with the passage
of time. This work was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique
Electroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB) and was realized in their studios in Bourges,
France.
— Jon Christopher Nelson

On a Roll is a work designed specifically for, and recorded
in an eight-channel environment and was realized within the University of
Illinois Experimental Music Studios. Unique miking and channel distribution
techniques, along with three-dimensional encoding techniques were incorporated
to enhance the spatialization and sonic imaging for the piece. Sonically,
the obvious is not what it seems. As a challenge to myself with regard to
sound design, the art of Foley was used to create illusions of rolling objects
that you may recognize; hence there are no recordings of actual rolling objects
until the last few seconds of the piece.
— Scott Wyatt

Biographies

John Cage (1912-1992) was the most publicly controversial
American composer of the twentieth century. Continually radical and inventive,
he escaped the confines even of atonality to bring to Western music new experiences
in musical color—the prepared piano, percussion ensemble, electronics,
even silence, and in musical form—hyper-rhythmic structures, chance
composition, and ultimately indeterminism.
Cage’s work in electroacoustic music begin with an early live-electronics
work Imaginary Landscape no.1 (1939) for variable-speed turntables playing
frequency recordings at different and changing speeds along with muted piano
and cymbals. After a hiatus of twelve years, during which he wrote his signature
works for prepared piano and percussion ensemble, and developed the use of
chance operations through contact with Zen Buddhism and the music of Morton
Feldman, Cage retuned to live electronics with Imaginary Landscape no.4 (1951)
and Radio Music (1956,) both for multiple radios, and Cartridge Music (1960),
for phonograph cartridges used as friction instruments. Cage also worked in
the genre of tape music as represented by Imaginary Landscape no.5 (1952)
for any 42 recordings, Williams Mix (1952) for eight one-track or four two-track
tapes, Fontana Mix (1958) for tape using indeterminate number of tracks, and
the grand spectacle of HPSCHD, for up to seven amplified harpsichords fifty-one
tapes of computer-generated sound, five thousand slides and several films,
all presented simultaneously (1967-69, in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller).
Electronics then figured prominently in Cage’s later large-scale theatric
works, in particular Finnegans Wake and the Europeras 1-5. In his final, smaller
scale works of the 1990s, Cage returned to simple oscillators and the Victrola.

Lawrence Fritts was born in Richland, Washington. He received
his PhD in Composition at the University of Chicago, where he studied with
Shulamit Ran, John Eaton, and Ralph Shapey. He is Associate Professor and
Area Head of Composition at the University of Iowa, where he has directed
the Electronic Music Studios since 1994. His music is recorded on the Frog
Peak, Innova, Tempo Primo, Albany, and Southport labels. His writings appear
in Papers Presented to the American Mathematical Society, Systems Research
and the Arts, the Computer Music Journal, Music Theory Spectrum, Proceedings
of the International Computer Music Association, and in the forthcoming book,
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Musicality. He serves as National Director
of Conferences for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the US (US) and
on the editorial board of The Journal of Mathematics and Music.

A native Iowan, Michael Giles received degrees from The
University of Iowa in Saxophone Performance and Pedagogy. He has successfully
taught at the college level and in the public schools. A diverse saxophonist,
he focuses on 20th saxophone repertoire and contemporary improvising forms.
He is an active performer, educator, and clinician throughout the Midwest.

Christopher Hopkins (festival organizer) works in music
composition, theory and analysis, performance, and applications of technology.
His creative and research interests include electroacoustic music, dialectics
of historical and contemporary musical forms, phonological description of
unusual performance techniques, innovative computer-based musical notations,
and tonal analysis of pre-Classical and early twentieth-century music. He
holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Cornell University, where his principal
mentors were Karel Husa (composition) and John Hsu (performance), and a Master
of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with
Donald Erb and Eugene O'Brien. His compositions have been performed at major
festivals in Basel, Grenoble, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Melbourne, New York, Tanglewood,
Toronto, Vienna, and Zürich, with broadcasts over the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Östereichischer Rundfunk,
Radio Canada, WNYC, and Public Radio International.

Barry Larkin holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in percussion
performance from the University of Southern California. Dr. Larkin participated
in the U.S.C. Contemporary Ensemble 1990 tour of France as solo percussionist.
As a free-lance artist, he has worked with such performers as Robert Goulet,
Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Roger Williams, and others. He is in charge of
all percussion activities and directs the ISU Percussion Ensemble.
Jon Christopher Nelson's electro-acoustic music has been performed widely
throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America and has been
honored with numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Commission. He is the
recipient of Luigi Russolo and Bourges Prizes and was recently awarded the
prestigious Bourges Euphonies d'Or prize. He has composed in residence both
at Sweden's national Electronic Music Studios and at the Institut International
de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges. His works can be heard on the Bourges,
Russolo Pratella, CDCM, NEUMA, ICMC, and SEAMUS labels. Nelson is currently
a Professor at the University of North Texas where he serves as both Director
of the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI) and the Associate
Dean of Operations.

Scott Wyatt, composer and Professor of Composition, is
the director of the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios, and
among other honors that he has received, he was one of the winners of the
International Society for Contemporary Music National Composers Competition
of 1978, the National Flute Association's 1979 Composition Competition, the
1979 Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Composition Competition in Italy,
the 1984 International Confederation of Electro-Acoustic Music GRAND PRIZE
at the 12th annual International Electro-Acoustic Music competition in Bourges,
France and a finalist in the 1989 International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition
in Bourges, France. He was the 1990 recipient of an Arnold Beckman Research
Award for the development of digital timescaling applications, and among others,
several 1996-2003 grants for the development of a specific compositional and
live performance methodology for use with multi-channel sound diffusion and
projection. His current research is on the development and application of
positional three-dimensional audio imaging for multi-channel audio. He served
as president of SEAMUS from 1989 until 1996, and he continues to serve on
its Board of Directors. His compositions are recorded on CENTAUR, GMEB Cultures
Electroniques Series, Library of Congress, MARK, OFFICE, SEAMUS, UBRES and
VERIATZA recordings.